I believe I quoted the CEO of Detra Corp. (the folks who own Wired Records) as saying that the music in Wired Records was too expensive and they'd prooven people were quite happy to buy anything as long as it was under a dollar. The 99c music on the site out sells everything by far, even though it's all extreamly old and not too flashly recorded. But the labels can't afford to drop the prices for many reasons.
Meanwhile, various mungings of notes (like the last Metallica album... hahaha) ...
Updating my The Sharp website hasn't been a waste of time. I've had a couple of thank you emails. mmm the warm glow of sharing.
Think I'll go an see Look Who's Toxic tonight after gig practice. LWT includes a bass player (Rob) that tried out to be Walken's bass player when Daniel was away in 2001. Also, their drummer used to be Bruce (now guitar/vocals in The Junkers) who used to be our drummer. We covered a bit of one of their songs ages ago. If you think that's inbred you know nothing of the Melbourne music scene. It's one giant pond of mutant children. They're playing at the Town Hall Hotel, 33 Errol Street, North Melbourne around 10pm.
Alternate jobs. Porting games between platforms [The Age]. Would anyone pay to have their website ported to php/mySQL from SQL Server/.NET?
Photo of us in the back of InPress today. The one with me looking down with my Transformers t-shirt on. We really need new promo photos.
They're voting in the California election thingy. "I just looked for the longest name". Looks like Arnie's going to win [The Age].
Three years ago tomorrow I had a big assed rant about a lot of stuff from the Olypics and racism to that whole MP3 thing. It's great to see the article on racism in Sydney from a visiting journo from San Francisco is still on the net (I read this article in the real paper while in SF in September 2000). I question some of the quotes in this article though. There is no way an Australian said they'd be "rooting" for Cathy Freeman.
I'd forgotten all about the myMP3 service. Remember that? You could put your CD in your CD-ROM drive, a java thingy would confirm what CD it was, and then you could download the MP3s from that CD. In theory when you buy a CD you don't buy anything, you just buy the right to listen to the music. So in theory you could download an MP3 of said music you just bought quite legally. In practice it got MP3.com sued by every major music label, cost them tens of millions of dollars and almost destroyed them.
Come along. See us climb the rope to the piles of steaming (?) cash or maybe fall into a pit of rabid starving dogs... who knows.
Yes, you too can buy your very own Justice Era plastic copies of Kirk, Lars and Jason and heck, even the 1988 tour stage with chunks 'o Lady Justice. You can only seem to get James with the stage (which comes with all four figures and flashing light action). So when are Metallica going to go on their acoustic unmasked tour? Or am I getting them mixed up with someone else?
acb seems to be offline again.
James has been on the cover of a lot of guitar magazines lately, as has that scary new bass player of theirs. This is frightening.
Until a news aggregator is built into Internet Explorer (or Opera or Mozilla) with a nice big "subscribe" button, no-one (statistically) is going to use RSS feeds. I'd like to set up an RSS feed for my photoblog, it's easy, but I only want to do it out of a nerdy desire to fit in, I don't actually think anyone will use it.
Maybe they are built in to the latest version Opera and Mozilla. What would I know?
There is a news aggregator plug in for Outlook. The marriage of news group and email never really worked for me, not since Netscape Communicator did it.
Work is looking better. Won't know how much better until November, maybe December but it's better. Thanks Alex.
No Half Life 2 until next year [The Register]. I'm thinking the code leak thing is a lame excuse. It's the only game I've been excited about and vaguely thinking of buying since the original Half Life. Oh... other than Doom III.
UK changes it's copyright laws [The Register]. More protection for DRM and anti-copy technology. Private Use copying (ie. converting a CD to tape or to MP3) was never legal in the UK (and isn't in Australia either) and isn't now even after the changes.
"A person who infringes copyright in a work by communicating the work to the public -(a) in the course of a business, or
(b) otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright,
commits an offence if he knows or has reason to believe that, by doing so, he is infringing copyright in that work."
Robertson said: "It could be interpreted under these new Regulations that you are now committing a criminal offence when you use KaZaA or other P2P services. You may not be acting in the course of a business; but by making a music file available for download for any other users of your chosen P2P network, you are communicating the work - potentially at least - to millions, i.e. to an extent that the music industry could say is prejudicing its rights."
Question of the day. If you set up your own private P2P network that no-one could access except your chosen few friends. Lets say, 5 people. Is sharing a file on this network of 5 people more or less illegal than sharing that fire on a network with millions of people on it?
Tomb Raider 2 was OK, probably equal with the first one, it's a very different movie. Less freaky. Much more "hollywood". LOTS more violence. You could still pretend Lara was a nice girl in the last movie (ignoring the tomb thieving of course). It had some excellent horror toward the end when it genre-changed for about 20 minutes.
Bigger fines arn't much use if you've not any more likely to be caught. How big a problem is non-payment at cinemas? It's just as easy to get into those for free. Maybe people think it's something worth paying for?
Katie spent another week's pay at the dentist on Tuesday. Back again next Tuesday.
Move to Wodonga, the government commands it.
Argh! I've just witnessed a new bread of popup ad [on The Age]. It was one of those flash ads that appears in a random spot and disappears except it appeared full length across the top of my screen like a Windows Start Menu OUTSIDE of my browser. Needless to say I stared at it in shock until it went away, which is of course the whole point. I see much evil coming from this.
The Simpsons immiates life again. Roy of Siegfried and Roy mauled almost to death by his tiger in front of an audience [The Age]. He's stable.
Indie Initiative at the Espy, Thursday night's get into gig free card for unsigned bands, is shut down. It's all our fault. We thought about getting a gig. The last Neil Wedd thing we looked at the wrong way (way back when it was on at the Greyhound in St. Kilda) went belly up too.
Sunday we jammed with new guitarist, should be joining us for 4 or 5 songs at The Cue gig on Friday. That'll be interesting, particularly because The Cue is apparently very hard to mix (the mixing desk is BEHIND the stage).